Binkies and Briefcases

SUBSCRIBE

I’m Back

By: Stephanie5 Comments

I know I’ve been absent from blogging for a while.

I’ve been busy conquering my fears…

eating fast food….


and hanging out with vermin…

We took a trip to Florida last week and we just got back yesterday. It was a lot of fun! Sort of made us regret ever leaving. The weather was beautiful and the kids had a great time.

We visited our old friends and our old neighborhood in Tampa and met up with the foster family Nicholas lived with before we adopted him at the same McDonald’s where we met him for the very first time three years ago.

We got to explore the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Animal Kingdom in Disney World and Nicholas loved the Lego store and the T-Rex restaurant in Downtown Disney. We stayed in the Animal Kingdom Lodge with my sister, my dad, and step-mom and the hotel was amazing. Every day we woke up to giraffes and zebras right outside the windows.

We also made it to Universal Studios and met the Cat in the Hat and saw the new Harry Potter section of the park.

It was a very, very busy couple of days, but we made great memories. Here’s hoping the kids take a long nap today because I’m exhausted!

Linking to Foto Friday

Stuff to Do When You’re Stuck Inside

By: Stephanie1 Comment

Yesterday the speaker for my moms’ group gave us a lot of awesome ideas for stuff to do outside when the weather gets warmer, but since it’s only the beginning of March & we’ve got a while before that happens around here, I thought today I’d share some ideas for things to do inside with your kids.

23 Cheap or Free Kids Activities for Indoors

Here are a few ideas from my Aunt Charlotte, retired educator extraordinaire

  • Take a sweet potato & put it in a drinking glass, half-submerged in water. Watch it over the next few weeks as it grows a vine.
  • Place a stalk of celery, with leaves still on it, in a glass of water colored with food coloring. Watch the plant “drink” the water over the next day or so as the leaves at the top begin to change color.
  • Create a scavenger hunt inside the house

And a few of our own:

  • Use toothpicks & mini marshmallows to build sculptures (if you are homeschooling this is also a great way to demonstrate the concept of a vertex)
  • Squirt shaving creme on the kitchen table & practice writing shapes, letters, and numbers
  • Plant an indoor herb garden, watch the plants grow, then cut & cook with them
  • A.C Moore sells balsa wood model airplanes for $1. They are fun to build & paint.
  • Fill a large bowl with water, spread a towel out on the floor, & let the kids have at it with cooking utensils.
  • Use pudding or icing to fingerprint on rice cakes at snack time.
  • Make English muffin pizzas
  • Give the kids a disposable camera, let them take all of the pictures, then have them developed & allow them to make a scrapbook or collage out of the pictures
  • Turn out the lights and play indoor “laser tag” with flashlights.
  • Have a “snowball” fight with clean socks
  • Allow older kids to use dry erase markers to decorate a window or mirror
  • Create a crystallized picture by painting with a salt/water paste onto construction paper
  • Older children can use a q-tip to paint small amounts of bleach onto construction paper (if you are homeschooling this is great to represent a chemical change)
  • Have the kids design a menu for tonight’s dinner
  • Have a paper airplane race
  • Use toilet paper or paper towel tubes to create a race track for marbles.
  • Order blank books here for about $2 and let the kids create their own books.
  • Melt crayon shavings between two sheets of wax paper with an iron to make “stained glass”
  • Use fabric markers to color on old t-shirts
  • Make cards to mail to a local nursing home

If you have more ideas for us, please add them to the comment section.

And if you’re looking for ways to keep busy on a budget during warm weather, check out this post with over 20 ideas!

Free Summer Activities for Kids

Ballards Handprint Knock-Off

By: Stephanie4 Comments

When I saw this picture on the Ballard’s Design website, I had this conversation with myself:
Why would anyone ever pay $89 a piece for those? I could make them for free. But why would I want to? …Actually, I bet those gloves would make a cute handprint keepsake.

Guess what? I was right. (It happens occasionally.) I can make those for free & it did turn out to be a cute keepsake.

I didn’t want to use just any old newspaper, I wanted it to have some sort of meaning (plus we didn’t have any newspaper, anyway) so I Googled former First Lady Abigail Adams, the namesake for my Abby, and printed off a few paragraphs in a very small print.

I brewed some tea and just dabbed the tea bag onto the paper to get the color I wanted. Then I scrunched up the wet paper & unscrunched it very carefully. When I was happy with the scrunchiness I let it dry for a while. Abby, who is not quite two yet, actually helped with this part, so it’s a really easy activity to do with kids.

Here’s a before & after:

Then I came back with a Sharpie & traced a cut-out of my daughter’s hand. (I made a cut out ahead of time in case she wriggled around and made it hard for me not to mess up on the tea stained paper.) I added a few other details with the Sharpie too.

I just used a glue stick to stick them to a piece of white paper & stuck them in a frame we already had. I think they would make really cute, easy, (and cheap) Mother’s day gifts.

Super Easy Toddler Sundress

By: Stephanie1 Comment

We are going to Disney World next month. (Yay!!!) Since it will be March, Florida will be pretty warm, but we will still be getting snow in Pennsylvania. This is a bit of a dilemma…should I buy new summer clothes for Abby to wear just for a few days that she will outgrow by the time PA’s weather gets warm?

How to Sew a Toddler Sundress

Hmm..nope. I think I’ll make some instead. This is the easiest toddler sundress ever.

Just measure your daughter across the chest and cut a piece of an old sweater that width by whatever length you want.

Then cut off the rest of the band at the bottom. We are going to make the straps out of that.

Now you should have 2 pieces that look like this.

Ok. cut the band in half so that you have 2 pieces for the straps.

Turn the sweater around so that the bottom band is now at the top. Sew up the side seem from where you cut the sweater, hem the bottom, and attach the straps. (I also did a zigzag stitch on the side of each strap where I cut the band off of the sweater in order to keep it from unraveling.)

We will probably wear a t-shirt under it when we are in public.

Pulling the fabric through the machine is what creates that little ruffle on the bottom. The harder you pull while you are sewing, the more it will ruffle.

Let me know if you make one!

This isn’t the first time I’ve upcycled an old sweater. Check out my Anthro Sweater Skirt Knock Off here and if you’re new to sewing, click to watch the three videos I made to help you learn about your sewing machine.

Anthropology Sweater Skirt Tutorial

Toddler Backpack for Valentine’s Day & Beyond

By: Stephanie2 Comments


You might have noticed that there aren’t a lot of boy-friendly Valentine’s Day activities out there.

I wanted something cute that both Nick & Abby could use, but I’m also too practical to be making a lot of cutesy seasonal stuff. I wanted something they could use year round.

I also really like the owl trend that seems to be everywhere lately. They’re adorable, they represent wisdom, and they are gender neutral. What’s not to love?

So I made this cute little backpack from the free downloadable pattern found here. I used canvas drop cloth & scraps of knit jersey (straps) and felt (owl’s face) that I already had on hand & then I just used a fabric marker to write “Whooo’s got mail?” $0 projects are my favorite. 🙂

I didn’t bother with the interfacing mentioned in the tutorial. I just traced the pattern on the drop cloth, cut out the pieces & sewed them together. You might also notice that my thread choice was not ideal. That’s because I didn’t bother changing the thread in my machine, which was blue. I’m pretty sure my toddlers will get over it, but that’s why I can never have an Etsy shop. I am way too much of a quick & dirty sewer.

It’s very small, but it will be perfect for carrying Valentine’s notes or for pretending to be mail carriers long after Valentine’s Day.

You could also enlarge the pattern and create an easy knock-off of these Pottery Barn Kids backpacks

Turning the Geek Squad into Real Super Heros

By: Stephaniecomment

WBFF FOX45 – Top Stories – Burglary Arrest – Keith Daniels

I thought this was so cool, I had to share with you. One of Eddie’s college friends is a bit of a local hero in our home town of Baltimore lately for having the genius idea to use Craigslist & Facebook to catch a serial burglar. Click on the link to see how he used technology to fight crime!

Infinity Dress..um…or not

By: Stephanie2 Comments

I was looking for easy dress patterns online a while ago & found a bunch of tutorials for infinity dresses, which I thought I recognized as the kind of dress my grandmom made for my mom to wear to her prom. They’ve been around forever and they are super expensive to buy (This one is almost $1,000!)

As you can see in the video, it’s really easy! It’s just 4 pieces of fabric: 3 rectangles & a circle. So today I tried making one for the first time, but…ummmm…I don’t know what went wrong because I followed the tutorial exactly. The construction went pretty well, but as you can see, it is NOT dress length.

It will make a cute shirt for summer, I guess. Next time when I make the circle skirt I’m going to at least triple, maybe quadruple the length I want it to be when I make the original square. I can always hem it if it’s too long.

This is a really cool technique because you can wear it a million different ways & it only takes about 45 minutes to put together. (Probably less if it’s not your first time.)

Joann’s has knits on sale for 30% off this week so I might go buy some black fabric & try again, with a much, much, much longer skirt.


 

Party Button
 

Valentine Postcard Printable

By: Stephanie1 Comment

I got an email from my church mentor with the letters for the word “Valentine” spelled out in this verse. I thought it was pretty cool, so I re-did it using Picnik. I think it would be cute printed out on photo paper and used as a postcard with a little love note on the back or framed as part of a Valentine’s Day vignette.

Click the picture for a larger version.

Photobucket

A Tale of Tantrums, Tenacity, and Toothpaste

By: Stephanie10 Comments

It’s been a hard day.

It’s only noon, but I’m calling it early.

My daughter is cutting her 2 year molars and has been very grumpy all morning. After lunch I tried to cuddle her for a while and put her down for a nap. That lasted for about 10 minutes before there was an explosive dirty diaper and she needed to be changed, so we started the cuddle and sing routine all over again & she finally settled down.

Then I felt bad because Nicholas, although I had almost always been in the same room with him, hadn’t had a lot of attention all morning, so I went into the living room to ask if he wanted to read a book with me.

He didn’t answer, all I got from him was a deer-in-headlights look.

I’d caught him red-handed.

Blue-handed actually.

Permanent marker. (Again!)

And in my mind I screamed, “Are you *#@!ing kidding me?! You just did this like two weeks ago, you little $#@%!” but not in real life. In real life I said nothing as I realized that this time it was not just on the flatscreen tv like the last time. Nope, this time in addition to being on the tv, it was on the hardwood floors, the microfiber couch, the coffee table, his hands, his clothes, the entertainment center, two sippy cups and the doll carriage Abby got for Christmas.

He had only been alone for about 5 minutes.

Luckily, the last time this happened my Aunt Carol told us to try using toothpaste to get it out and it had worked.

The toothpaste trick worked on the hardwood floors, the tv, and kind of worked on his hands. I haven’t even tried to get it out of the fabrics yet and I don’t really care about the Craigslist coffee table. The special cleaner they gave us at Bon Ton got about 85% of it out of the couch.

I actually found myself grateful that at least this time it wasn’t poop. Come to think of it, there hasn’t been any fecal smearing around here for a few months. Progress.

He watched as I cleaned everything and he cried and told me he was sorry. He was terrified his daddy would be mad. “Will he still give me a kiss when he comes home?” was yelled over and over again by the almost-4-year-old with the tear streaked face, blue hands, and ruined pajamas. “Nicholas, I don’t know. He will probably be mad and he might not give you a kiss, but he will still love you.” I was curt and cool, and I did spank him. (If you want to call one half-hearted swat on top of a pull-up and pajamas a “spanking.” Personally, I’m still completely torn about the spanking issue, but if a child was to ever get a spanking, this seemed to be the appropriate time.) Then I made him tell me he was sorry, we said a prayer & I told him that even though I was mad I still loved him, and he has been in his room ever since. At first he was crying, then I think he slept a little. Now he is just humming to himself.

It’s not about the punishment. It’s about my stamina and being able to prove over and over again that no matter what you do, Little One, you cannot break my love for you. I know you have been left before and you are broken. You are scared. You may be strong, but I am stronger. I’ve got my heels dug in now and I’m staying. Forever.

Jenny McCarthy would call me a Warrior Mom.

Amy Chua would say that I am not a Tiger Mother.

but I’m just a mom.

Nick’s mom.

Nick’s third mom.

I could be angry about the stuff, but today I’m not.

I could have yelled and said hurtful things and scarred a tiny soul, already bruised, but today I didn’t.

Instead, I’m just tired. I thought about my Mommom and the time my sister accidentally broke a family heirloom. The time I expected her to be angry, but instead she said, “It’s just a candy dish, your sister is a child.”

It was an important life lesson. One that most children would only need to learn once.

My son is not most children.

Before I became a mother I sat, numerous times, with social workers who asked what we would do in hypothetical situations such as these. Could we handle it? Once we were asked what we would do if our child purposefully threw a baseball through our tv. Our generic answer was that we would get a new tv.

It feels different in real life, when that child has been yours for several years now and you know that they know better. It feels different when he only does it when he is alone with you, so you are left to deal with the consequences all by yourself.

It is the hardest thing I will ever do and sometimes I make mistakes. With Abby there is more room for error, we are all she has ever known. With Nicholas I need to be more calculated.

Faith
Love
Structure
Discpiline

I have decided this is the hierarchy of needs for our family.

It is true that discipline comes last in my house.

You might think that’s the wrong way to fight this battle.

That’s probably why God and a team of social workers chose me instead.

Weekend Bloggy Reading

And I Didn’t Even Have Time to Pick Out a Dress…

By: Stephanie7 Comments

I’ve am shocked an in awe that I was chosen by Melissa from Kensignton Cottage for the Stylish Blogger award because she loved our kitchen makeover! Thank you so much for thinking of me, Melissa!

Lucky for me, I can stay right here in my sweat pants because this award doesn’t come with a big ceremony or anything. As a recipient, I’m just supposed to tell you 7 things about myself you probably didn’t know and pass the award on to 7 other bloggers.

Hmmm…what to share, what to share…ok, in no particular order…

1. I LOVE American Girl dolls. Sort of odd, for a grown woman, I admit, but I appreciate them as collector’s items and for integrating reading and history into imaginative play. There was a time not so very long ago when I actually owned every single one of the historical dolls, but then they kept making new ones, we had kids & I had better things to do than spend money on dolls for myself. Anyway, I really want to visit the American Girl store in NY or Chicago one of these days. And speaking of Chicago…

2. I am a little obsessed with Oprah. My biggest lifelong goal has been to be a guest on her show, (not just in the audience, I want to be a personally invited guest, darn it) but now that it’s ending I’m kind of devastated that won’t happen. Even if I get to be on one of her OWN network shows it just won’t be the same. The dream has died. 🙁

3. I think my home town of Baltimore has the best regional food in the country. I’m not quite sure what’s wrong with the rest of the world because they still haven’t figured out how to make a decent crab cake or that snowballs & pit beef are amazing.

4. I hate the idea of skiing. My husband loves it & he usually goes a few times a year. I just really don’t want to pay $200 to freeze my butt off, fall down a hill, and be forced to ride that terrifying lift thing. No thank you.

5. I think my best parenting accomplishment to date is that, even though they are only toddlers, my kids have good manners. Earlier today we were out and Nicholas needed to ask a lady something & he started his sentence with, “Excuse me, ma’am…” People usually comment on how adorable it is, but my kids know it is expected. Now Nick actually corrects our manners. (and he’s usually right!)

6. My favorite book will probably always be Just As Long As We’re Together by Judy Blume. I read it the first time in fifth grade and I loved that it started with the Sentence, “Stephanie is into hunks.” A boy-crazy main character who shared my name? Loved.

7. I cannot spell, but I used to write all the time and I really should get back into it. In fact, in middle & high school I kept four separate note books. One was for short stories, one was for poems, one was a regular diary and one was my “boy book,” which was a separate book where I wrote about boys (in case you couldn’t tell from the title) because I decided that my diary should only include more philosophical things. As far as I know, all of these books were destroyed in Hurricane Isabelle when my parent’s house flooded. I bring this up because my new ultimate goal, now that being a guest on Oprah is a dead end, is to have a book published. Hmmm…maybe Oprah will read it & I’ll still be invited on one of her shows…

Now that you know how truly lame I really am, here comes the fun part.

I hereby pass the torch on to these fabulous bloggers:

1. My friend Mary Joy at Seeds of Encouragement Sewn with Grace. Mary Joy is passionate about sharing her faith and her love of Homemaking on her blog & she helps me to remember what a privilege it is to be able to stay home with my little ones, even when it feels like more of a punishment.

small button

2. Michelle from That Mommy Blog. Michelle and I are in the same stage of life and quickly became blog friends. She has been featuring some great Silhouette projects and recently threw the cutest winter-themed birthday party that you’ve ever seen!

Build{hers} club Button

3. Sandra from Sawdust and Paper Scraps. This woman is AMAZING! She’s getting ready to move and has been giving her readers a tour of her house. Almost every room includes built-ins that she did all by her onesies.

4. My real-life friend Satoko who blogs at Sunshine Smile. Satoko is the one who inspired me to get back into sewing after a 15-or-so-year absence and start making toys and clothes for my kids. Plus she is hands-down one of the most talented photographers in the world of blogs.

5. Ana White of Ana-white.com. Undoubtedly, Ana has no time to respond to this award, but I’m giving it to her anyway. Since I started following her last year, her popularity has exploded. She started as a rural Alaskan housewife who decided to make afforadable furniture because the high-end stores she loved were out of her price range. She shares the plans for free and now her site is literally getting millions of hits a day, she’s been featured in magazines, and she has a book deal! Not to mention, she has single-handedly started a nationwide grassroots movement of women building their own furniture. I am dumbfounded by what she was able to accomplish in one year.

6. Ashley from Little Miss Momma. Ashley’s an adorable young mom who has a huge talent for writing and fierce sense of bravery. She took her own source of shame and pain and turned it into Sisterhood of Secrets, a safe place for women to show each other emotional support.

7. Christianne from Little Page Turners, a former teacher turned stay at home mom (like me) who blogs about great activities to incorporate children’s literature into your everyday life with toddlers. This might be my all-time favorite blog because Christi is real-life version of the mom I always imagined I would be. Life led me down a different path, one where I needed to chase away Nicholas’ demons for him, which outweighed all of that other stuff, but at Little Page Turners there is always a great craft idea, book recommendation, or snack to try. She’s like Diet Martha Stewart, all the good stuff you love about Martha but also down-to-earth with realistic ideas and a healthy relationship with her daughters.

Ok ladies, now it’s your turn.

What You’re Saying

Latest Posts

ALL I Never Knowed: The Book Is Here!

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my Email Newsletter. Thanks for visiting!Welcome back! Be sure to check out my Email Newsletter. Thanks for visiting!It’s finally here, in my hands. It has been a loooong time in the making, but our book, All I Never Knowed: Mental Illness, a Mother’s Love, and […]

Save Money with Fetch

Hey everyone! This is Chelsea, Steph’s asistant, back with the simplest app for getting cash back on things you’re already buying! We’ve covered Ibotta, Shopkick, Coupons.com, Swagbucks and we’re all saving hundreds of dollars by now, right? RIGHT!? I’m really hoping you guys have jumped on the rebate app savings train because it’s just so […]

Splendid Spoon Review

I was excited to receive a box of products to try from Splendid Spoon this summer! They invited me to try their line of plant-based, ready-to-eat foods and delivered them right to my door. Check one in the pro column for convenience. I did receive these products free of charge in order to rate them […]

My Networks